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"The Catcher in the Rye"

Critic: Eberhard Alsen Source: A Reader's Guide to J. D. Salinger, pp. 53-77. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.


[(essay date 2002) In the following essay, Alsen outlines the basic themes and recurring symbols in The Catcher in the Rye, discussing the original conception of the novel as a shorter work.]

I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.
Holden Caulfield


J. D. Salinger invented the central character of The Catcher in the Rye 10 years before the publication of that novel. The sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield first appears in the story "Slight Rebellion Off Madison" which Salinger sold to New Yorker magazine in 1941 and which he later transformed into Chapter 17 of The Catcher in the Rye. "Slight Rebellion" ["Slight Rebellion Off Madison"] is the story of Holden's relationship with his girl friend Sally Hayes. Holden eventually alienates Sally by calling her "a royal pain" because she doesn't want to run away to the woods of Massachusetts or Vermont with him. The New Yorker shelved the story in 1941 but finally published it in 1946. Meanwhile, Collier's magazine printed another story about Holden Caulfield, "I'm Crazy" (1945). This story contains what amounts to a plot outline of The Catcher in the Rye. It begins with Holden saying good-bye to his history teacher Spencer at Pentey [sic] Preparatory School, and it ends with Holden sneaking into his parents' apartment in New York to talk to his sister Phoebe before telling his parents that he's been expelled from yet another school.
Another preliminary study for The Catcher in the Rye was "a novelette ninety pages long," so Salinger told William Maxwell, when Maxwell was writing a biographical piece about him for the Book-of-the-Month Club News in 1951. Maxwell reports that Salinger had the novelette accepted for publication in 1946 but that he withdrew it at the last minute and "decided to do it over again" (5). That ninety-page draft probably was an expanded version of "I'm Crazy" with "Slight Rebellion Off Madison" spliced into the middle of it.

Critical Reception

The Catcher in the Rye was received enthusiastically by the reading public. Even before its publication, it was adopted by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and it sold fabulously well. Ten years after its first publication, over a million and a half copies had been sold in the United States. It was translated into dozens of languages and put on the reading lists of high schools in America and in several European countries. To this day, the worldwide sales of The Catcher in the Rye still total close to a quarter million a year.
Surprisingly, the first reviews of The Catcher in the Rye were mixed. Some reviewers praised the novel as a significant success while others panned it as a disappointing failure. Still others were offended by what they called the book's vulgar and obscene language.
On the one hand, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Saturday Review of Literature reviewed the book positively. Nash Burger, in the New York Times, called Catcher [The Catcher in the Rye] "an unusually brilliant first novel" (19); N. S. Behrman, in the New Yorker, called it "a brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (65); and Harrison Smith, in the Saturday Review, judged it to be "a remarkable and absorbing novel" (28) and "a book to be read thoughtfully and more than once" (30).
On the other hand, the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Nation gave the novel thumbs-down reviews. Anne Goodman, in the New Republic, said that "the book as a whole is disappointing" (23). It is "a brilliant tour-de-force, but in a writer of Salinger's undeniable talent one expects something more" (24). Harvey Breit, in the Atlantic Monthly, made the point that Holden Caulfield is "an urban, transplanted Huck Finn" (6) but that unlike Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye ultimately fails because "whatever is serious and implicit in the novel is overwhelmed by the more powerful comic element" (7). And in the Nation, Ernest Jones (not the Ernest Jones who was a disciple of Freud's) admitted that The Catcher in the Rye is "a case history of all of us," but he said that "though always lively in its parts, the book as a whole is predictable and boring" (25).
The aspect of The Catcher in the Rye that caused the greatest disagreement among reviewers is its style. For instance, Riley Hughes, the reviewer in the Catholic World complained about an "excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language" (31), and Morris Longstreth, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, found the novel to be "wholly repellent in its mingled vulgarity, naïveté, and sly perversion." Longstreth concluded that The Catcher in the Rye "is not fit for children to read" (30). This judgment was shared, a decade later, by parents of high school students in places such as Louisville, Kentucky; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and San Jose, California where the school boards banned the novel because of its language.
More open-minded reviewers analyzed the novel's style objectively and noted the influence of Ring Lardner and Ernest Hemingway. Writing for the New York Herald Tribune, Virgilia Peterson said that "had Ring Lardner and Ernest Hemingway never existed, Mr. Salinger might have had to invent the manner of his tale." She described this "manner" by saying, "The Catcher in the Rye repeats and repeats, like an incantation, the pseudo-natural cadences of a flat, colloquial prose which at best, banked down and understated, has a truly moving impact and at worst is casually obscene." According to Peterson, the value of the book depends on Holden's "authenticity," that is, on "what Holden's contemporaries, male and female, think of him" (4).
The academic critics didn't have a go at the novel until the mid-fifties. The fact that the novel had become a best seller among adolescents rubbed some critics the wrong way but confirmed the opinion of others that with The Catcher in the Rye they had a new classic on their hands. The most positive of the early academic analyses is entitled "J. D. Salinger: Some Crazy Cliff" (1956). It was written by Arthur Heiserman and James E. Miller who bestowed epic grandeur on The Catcher in the Rye when they asserted that the novel belongs to the "ancient and honorable narrative tradition ... of the Quest" (196). The two critics saw similarities between The Catcher in the Rye and such masterworks of world literature as Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses and such American classics Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. They said about Holden Caulfield that "unlike other American knights errant, Holden seeks Virtue second to Love," and they explained Holden's quest by saying that he is "driven toward love of his fellow man" (197-198).
At the opposite end of the critical spectrum, George Steiner took issue with the exaggerated praise that other critics had heaped upon The Catcher in the Rye. In his article, "The Salinger Industry" (1959), Steiner granted Salinger that "he has a marvelous ear for the semi-literate meanderings of the adolescent mind" (82), and he admitted that Salinger is "a most skillful and original writer" (85). However, Salinger should not be praised "in terms appropriate to the master poets of the world." Salinger falls short of being a writer of the first rank, so Steiner argued, because he "flatters the very ignorance and moral shallowness of his young readers. He suggests to them that formal ignorance, political apathy and a vague tristesse are positive virtues" (83).
Subsequently, the critical pendulum swung in Salinger's favor, and since the early sixties, most critics have written appreciative analyses of The Catcher in the Rye.

Narrative Structure and Point of View

In its narrative structure and point of view The Catcher in the Rye resembles Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Like Twain's novel, Salinger's is told in the first person by an adolescent, the plot is episodic, the central conflict is between an adolescent and adult society, and the reader's interest is generated less by the events of the plot than by the unique personality of the narrator-protagonist.
However, the differences between Catcher and Huck Finn are more crucial than the similarities. First of all, the events in The Catcher in the Rye all occur on one weekend between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning while the events in Huck Finn span over two months. Secondly, the episodes in the plot are tied together more closely in Catcher than they are in Huck Finn. And thirdly, the conflict between Holden and adult society is resolved, whereas the conflict between Huck Finn and adult society remains unresolved. At the end of Catcher, Holden is getting ready to go back to school, but at the end of Huck Finn, Huck is getting ready to run away again, to "light out for the territory."
The events in The Catcher in the Rye follow one another in an almost random order, and the sequence of some of the events at Pencey Prep and the sequence of some of those in New York could be rearranged without damaging the plot. However, the episodes of the plot are strung like pearls on four narrative strands of different lengths. The two longer ones stretch through the length of the entire novel. They are Holden's conflict with the world of adults and his descent into an almost suicidal depression. The two shorter narrative strands are developed only in the second half of the novel. They are the decline of Holden's health and his inner change.
The novel's central conflict is between Holden and the adult world. It is due to Holden's unwillingness to become part of this world because most adults he knows are phonies, that is, people who claim to be something they are not. This central conflict is muted because Holden has more dramatic, face-to-face confrontations with people his own age than with adults. However, those with whom he does have such confrontation are adolescents who have already achieved the phoniness of adults. One such individual is Holden's roommate Ward Stradlater. Stradlater looks like a well-groomed individual but is a secret slob; moreover, in his relationships with girls, he has only one thing on his mind, and that is sexual conquest. Another adolescent who acts like an adult is Holden's girlfriend Sally Hayes, whom he calls "the queen of the phonies" because she is extremely concerned about appearances and, above all, because she acts as though she were already an adult.
During his conflict with Sally Hayes, Holden reveals that the kind of adult future Sally looks forward to is abhorrent to him. This conflict arises when Holden asks Sally to run away with him to the woods of Massachusetts or Vermont. He would get a job, and they would live in a cabin by a brook and maybe even get married. Sally tells Holden that his plan is an unrealistic fantasy because if he didn't get a job they'd both starve to death; besides they're still practically children, and they still have time to do all those things after he goes to college. She says: "There'll be oodles of marvelous places to go to." But Holden says it won't be the same after they are adults. If they wanted to go away they would have to telephone all their family and friends to say goodbye, and when they got to where they're going they would have to send back postcards. But what's worst, he would have to work in an office somewhere in Manhattan, ride to work in buses or cabs, read newspapers, and have other people over to play bridge.
Holden expresses a similar distaste for adult life when his sister Phoebe tells him that he has a very negative outlook and that there's nothing he wants to be when he grows up, not even a lawyer like his father. Holden says that lawyers are all right if they are committed to saving innocent people's lives. But that's not what lawyers do. All they do is make tons of money, play golf, buy expensive cars, and drink Martinis. In short, in Holden's view, even his own father is a phony because he is more interested in making money than in helping others.
Because he can't accept the kind of adult future that he describes to Sally and Phoebe, Holden decides to run away. He plans to hitchhike out West, get a job at a gas station, build himself a little cabin on the edge of the woods, and live there for the rest of his life. He'll pretend to be a deaf-mute so that he does not have to talk to adults.
Holden's conflict with the adult world is resolved because his little sister Phoebe makes him give up his rebellion. When Holden tells Phoebe about his plans to run away, Phoebe decides to skip school and come along with him. She is so persistent that Holden eventually tells her that he has changed his mind and that he is not going away anywhere. At this moment Holden's conflict with the adult world is resolved because he has decided to go home and confront his parents, even though he knows they will probably send him to a very strict military school.
Another pervasive narrative pattern that helps string together the episodes of the plot is Holden's emotional decline. We see the first symptom when he is on his way to say good bye to his history teacher at Pencey Prep. As he is about to cross a highway, he feels that he may disappear when he steps into the road. After he finishes packing his suitcase and gets ready to leave his dorm, he expresses his first death wish. He says that he felt so lonely that he almost wished he were dead. And when he actually walks out of the dorm, he breaks into tears.
Holden's death wish becomes more specific in New York after he gets beaten up by the pimp Maurice. He says he was thinking of committing suicide by jumping out of the hotel window. The next day, when he argues with his girlfriend Sally Hayes, he explains his crankiness by saying that he feels absolutely lousy. Later, that night, in the bathroom of a hotel bar, Holden once again breaks down and cries. And still later that same night, Holden's favorite teacher, Mr. Antolini, makes what Holden considers a homosexual pass at him and Holden says at this point that he was more depressed than he ever was in his entire life. The next morning, as Holden walks up Fifth Avenue toward Phoebe's school, he again has the strange sensation that he will disappear every time he crosses a street.
Holden finally overcomes his depression when he watches Phoebe go around and around on a carrousel in Central Park. He says that he didn't care that the rain was soaking him to the skin because he felt tremendously happy, and this happiness almost made him cry. Holden tries to explain this sudden emotional change by saying that Phoebe looked so nice riding the carrousel. But that is not much of an explanation. Apparently Holden doesn't understand himself why he is no longer depressed.
The explanation for Holden's sudden emotional uplift lies in his inner change which makes up another narrative strand in the novel. This change begins in the middle of the novel, on Sunday morning, when Holden starts to find out that not all people turn into phonies when they grow up. He finds that out when he gets to know two nuns while having breakfast in an inexpensive restaurant. He is especially taken with the nun who is an English teacher and who shares his fondness for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Holden later thinks of those two nuns when Phoebe accuses him of not liking anything or anybody. Even though he talked to the nuns for only a short while, they are now among his favorite people, along with his dead brother Allie and his favorite teacher Mr. Antolini. Holden's visit with Mr. Antolini also has a lot to do with his inner change because Antolini takes Holden's rebellion seriously and recognizes it as a moral and spiritual crisis. And even though Holden recoils when Antolini expresses his fondness for him by stroking his head, he recognizes that Antolini is a caring individual and not a phony.
Holden completes his inner change when he accepts responsibility for Phoebe. Phoebe threatens to quit school if Holden runs away, and Holden ends his rebellion so that Phoebe will go back to school.
The fourth narrative strand, that of Holden's deteriorating health, not only helps to tie the plot's episodes together, it also lends credibility to Holden's surrender to the adult world. It could even be argued that at the end of the novel he is simply too sick to rebel any longer. Holden alerts us to the deterioration of his health at the beginning of the novel when he explains why he is in a sanatorium in California: "I practically got t.b. and came out here for all these goddam checkups and stuff" (5). Holden's health seems fine until Sunday night when he gets drunk at a hotel bar and then tries to sober up in the men's room by soaking his head in a sink. Then he walks to Central Park to look for the ducks in the partially frozen lagoon. As ice is forming in his hair, he wonders if he is going to contract pneumonia and die. Then on Monday morning, as he is walking down Fifth Avenue, he begins to perspire heavily, and he feels that he is on the verge of vomiting. When he is at Phoebe's school where he gives the secretary a note for Phoebe, he suddenly needs to sit down because he again feels nauseous. A short time later, while he is waiting for Phoebe in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he has to go to the bathroom because he feels a bout of diarrhea coming on. But before he can relieve himself, he passes out. Although he feels much better when he comes to, he later makes his condition worse by sitting on a park bench in the December rain while watching Phoebe ride the carrousel.
*
In addition to the four narrative strands of different lengths, what also ties together the novel's episodes is Holden Caulfield's distinctive voice. Salinger's choice of the first person point of view not only gives the novel its special flavor of authenticity, it also allows Holden to express thoughts and feelings that we would not be aware of if the novel were told by from an objective third person point of view. The choice of the first person point of view strengthens the reader's identification with the narrator-protagonist and ultimately makes the reader care more about the Holden's personality than the events of the plot.
The rightness of Salinger's decision in favor of the first person point of view becomes apparent when we compare a passage from "Slight Rebellion Off Madison" to the reworked version in The Catcher in the Rye. In the early story, Salinger uses an objective third person point of view. Therefore, we see Holden only from the outside and hear what he says, but we don't find out what he thinks and feels. In the early story, Holden tells Sally Hayes:

"You don't see what I mean at all."
"Maybe I don't. Maybe you don't either," Sally said.
Holden stood up with his skates slung over one shoulder. "You give me a royal pain," he announced quite dispassionately.
("Rebellion" ["Slight Rebellion Off Madison"] 84)


And that's how the scene ends in the short story. We don't find out what Holden thinks. We don't even find out how Sally reacts. Here now is the reworked passage as it appears in the novel:

"You don't see what I mean at all."
"Maybe I don't. Maybe you don't either," old Sally said. We both hated each other's guts by that time. You could see there wasn't any sense in trying to have an intelligent conversation. I was sorry as hell I'd started it.
"C'mon, lets get outa here," I said. "You give me a royal pain in the ass if you want to know the truth."
Boy did she hit the ceiling when I said that. I know I shouldn't've said it and I probably wouldn't've ordinarily, but she was depressing the hell out of me.
(Catcher 133)


The major difference between the scene in the story and the novel is that we learn much more about Holden's thoughts and feelings in the novel than we do in the story, and we can therefore identify more with him.
Another aspect of the narrative perspective in the novel is that Holden is occasionally able to step out of his own shoes and look at himself from the perspective of an outsider. Yet in other places, we find that he also has some blind spots in his view of himself.
The occasional objectivity of Holden's point of view is illustrated at the end of the passage in which he describes his fight with Sally Hayes. Holden says that he apologized like mad but that Sally wouldn't accept his apologies. In frustration, Holden did something he knows he shouldn't have done, he began to laugh. He admits that he has a very loud, stupid-sounding laugh, and in a typical Salingeresque non-sequitur, he says that if he ever sat behind himself in a movie theater and heard himself laugh like that, he'd lean over and tell himself to shut up.
On the other hand, there are a number of passages in the novel in which Holden demonstrates a blatant lack of self-perception. For instance, he doesn't even realize in retrospect, when he tells the story, how unrealistic he was when he asked Sally Hayes to run off to the woods with him and live in a cabin. When his money runs out so Holden said, he'll get a job to support the two of them. Here most readers will shake their heads about Holden's inability to see himself for what he is. Holden has never had to work for his money and probably would not like it at all. He can only entertain such notions because deep down he knows that he can always return to his affluent parents when things don't work out.
Thus the contrast between the blind spots in Holden's self-perception and his occasional ability to see himself exactly the way he is perceived by others is a unique element of the novel's narrative perspective. It helps to develop Holden into a fictional character who is unusually complex.

Characterization and Style

One of the astonishing things about The Catcher in the Rye is that adolescents all over the world--boys as well as girls--continue to identify with Holden Caulfield even now, 51 years after the novel was first published. Two reasons for the universal appeal of Holden's personality offer themselves. One is that Salinger subordinated all other aspects of the novel to the development of Holden's character. For instance, it seems that he created the minor characters not to advance the plot but to shed light on Holden's personality, and that he even designed the symbolism to clarify what kind of person Holden is. But the main reason Holden is so believable is that--like most adolescents--he is full of contradictions and ambivalent feelings.
The contradictions in Holden's character are reflected in his appearance. Although he is only sixteen when the events of the novel take place, he is six-foot-two-and-a-half and has a patch of gray hair on the right side of his head. Also, he wears a red hunting hat with the visor turned backwards which contrasts sharply with his sports coat and tie.
Holden is aware of some of the contradictions in his personality. One of these contradictions concerns his age. He sometimes acts as though he were much older than sixteen and sometimes as though he were much younger. On several occasions, Holden tries to pass himself off as older than he is. For instance, he invites two different cab drivers to stop at a bar for drinks and he tells the prostitute, Sunny, and the three girls from Seattle that he is twenty-two years old. But on other occasions, Holden also acts younger than his age, especially when he pretends to be a character in a movie. In one instance, he annoys his roommate Stradlater by tap-dancing all over the bathroom while Stradlater is shaving. Holden says that he is the Governor's son and that his father doesn't want him to be a tap dancer, he wants him to study at Oxford. But he can't help himself because dancing is in his blood. Holden even engages in make-believe when he doesn't have an audience. After he has been beaten up by the pimp Maurice, he pretends that he has been shot in the stomach. As he staggers around in his hotel room, he imagines that he is getting his automatic and that he is walking downstairs to find Maurice. He is clutching his stomach, and he is bleeding all over the stairs, but he finds Maurice and fires six bullets into his hairy belly.
Three other contradictions in Holden's character concern his attitudes toward the movies, literature, and religion. On the one hand, he goes to the movies often, imitates them, and at one point even gives us a long plot summary of a movie he went to see at Radio City, James Hilton's Random Harvest. But he makes the contradictory comment about the film that it was so "putrid" that he could not stop watching it. Elsewhere he says that he hates the movies like poison but that he gets a bang out of imitating them.
About his relation to literature Holden makes this contradictory statement: "I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot" (18). But when Holden talks about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, we see that he is far from illiterate but has a good understanding of these works.
Holden's comments on religion are also contradictory. He claims that he is an atheist, but then he explains that he likes Jesus but he doesn't like the Disciples because they always let Jesus down. And Holden also shows a better understanding of the personality of Jesus than a Quaker classmate when they disagree about the fate of Judas. Holden says that he believes Jesus never sent Judas to hell. In short, Holden's sensitive comments about Jesus contradict his statement that he is an atheist.
Another major contradiction in Holden's character has to do with his attitude toward money. While he is disdainful of money and generous with it, he also has more respect for wealthy people than for people who are not so well off. Holden's generosity is illustrated when he pays for the drinks of the three young women from Seattle with whom he dances on Saturday night and when he gives ten dollars to the nuns for their next collection and later frets that he didn't give them enough. But money itself doesn't mean much to him because he often forgets to pick up his change at restaurants and nightclubs. His disdain for money is also illustrated when he is down to his last four dollars and he uses the coins to skip them across the unfrozen part of the lagoon in Central Park.
Holden's disdain for money and his generosity stand in sharp contrast to statements that show him judging people by how much money they have. For instance, he mentions a roommate at a previous prep school who had very inexpensive suitcases while Holden had genuine cowhide bags from Mark Cross. Holden admits that he tends to dislike people just because they have cheap luggage. A moment later he tells us that one of the reasons he roomed with Stradlater at Pencey Prep is that Stradlater's suitcases were as good as his own. Holden again shows that he looks down on people who don't have much money when he walks behind a father, a mother, and a little boy who just came out of church on Sunday morning. Holden says he could tell they were poor. And then he explains that the father wore the kind of pearl-gray hat that poor fellows tend to wear when they want to look sharp.
And finally, like most adolescents, Holden has conflicting attitudes toward sex. He admits that he thinks about sex all the time and that sometimes he can imagine doing "very crumby stuff" if he had the opportunity. But when the opportunity does come up in New York, and he has a young prostitute in his hotel room, Holden suddenly isn't interested in sex. He says that he knows he is supposed to feel aroused when the girl pulls her dress up over her head, but he doesn't feel that way. Instead of feeling aroused by the girl, Holden feels sorry for her because she looks as if she is only sixteen, Holden's own age. That is why Holden says he felt more depressed than aroused.
Holden even has conflicting attitudes about necking. The previous year he made a rule that he was not going to neck with girls he did not respect. He broke that rule immediately because he spent that night necking with Anne Louise Sherman whom he considered a terrible phony. In short, Holden has the normal sexual urges of an adolescent, but he also has a conscience which tells him not to treat girls as mere sex objects.
Salinger gives Holden's personality additional depth through the secondary characters. Holden's attitudes toward and reactions to these people shed light on his likes and dislikes, especially since a number of the secondary characters seem to be pairs of opposites. Here we see another instance of Salinger's propensity to work in patterns of twos as in the doubling of letters in the names of characters and in his use of double protagonists in some of his early stories and his later novellas.
A pair of characters who reveal much about Holden's values are his older brother D. B., who is a successful writer, and his younger brother Allie, who died of leukemia. Holden's attitude toward D. B. is at best ambivalent and at worst negative. On the one hand, Holden says that D. B. is his favorite author, on the other hand he agrees with Antolini who said that a person who could write like D. B. should not write for Hollywood movies. And although Holden admires D. B. for making so much money, driving a Jaguar, and having a British movie actress for a girlfriend, he does call him a prostitute for selling out to Hollywood. If D. B. were not his brother, Holden would probably even call him a phony.
By contrast, Holden's attitude toward Allie is not only 100% positive but even worshipful. Holden says that Allie was the most intelligent person in the family. But what's even more important, Allie was also the kindest because Holden cannot remember that Allie ever got mad at anybody. Another thing that stands out about Allie is that he loved poetry so much that he copied his favorite poems on his baseball glove so he would have something good to read during the lulls in the games. Allie has remained Holden's favorite person even after his death, and Holden carries Allie's baseball glove around in his luggage as if it were a holy relic. In fact, Holden actually prays to Allie when he is about to cross a street and is afraid that he will disappear: "Allie, don't let me disappear, Allie. Please, Allie" (198). When we compare Holden's attitudes toward his brothers D. B. and Allie, we can see clearly that he respects Allie's kindness more than D. B.'s success.
That Holden ultimately judges people by how kind they are also becomes apparent when we examine his reasons for liking his former English teacher Antolini more than Spencer, his history teacher at Pencey. Holden tries to like Mr. Spencer and he even writes him a note so that Spencer won't feel so bad about flunking him. But when Holden goes to see him, Spencer is sarcastic and nasty while reading Holden's failing history exam back to him. Holden says that he won't ever forgive Spencer for his unkindness because if their roles were reversed, he would never have read that terrible exam out loud to Spencer.
While Mr. Spencer is too unkind to Holden, Mr. Antolini, Holden's English teacher from his previous prep school, is perhaps a bit too kind. One reason Holden likes Antolini is that he cared enough about James Castle, who committed suicide by jumping out of a window, to pick up his body and carry it to the infirmary. Moreover, Antolini is the only adult to take Holden seriously and reassure him that "many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now" (189). But when Holden wakes up on Antolini's couch at night to find Antolini patting his head and stroking his hair, he panics and thinks that Antolini is making a pass at him. Later Holden is no longer sure what Antolini's intentions were and starts thinking that even if Antolini is a homosexual, what counts is that he has been very kind to him.
That Holden tries to be more like Mr. Antolini than Mr. Spencer becomes apparent when we examine his relationship with another contrasting pair of minor characters, his roommate, Ward Stradlater, and his dorm neighbor, Robert Ackley. Ackley has a misanthropic personality, a face full of pimples, and "mossy" teeth. Although Ackley is being ostracized by most of the students at Pencey Prep, and although Holden dislikes his personality, he feels sorry for Ackley and invites him to go out on the town with him on his last night at Pencey Prep. Holden is probably the first person at Pencey to voluntarily spend time with Ackley, and Holden probably does so because unlike many others at Pencey, Ackley is at least a genuine person and not a phony.
By contrast with Ackley, Stradlater is one of the wealthiest, best looking, and most popular students at Pencey Prep, and while Holden can't help admiring him, he ultimately dislikes him even more than Ackley because he is a phony. There are several reasons why Holden thinks Stradlater is a phony. Stradlater always looks well groomed, but he never cleans his rusty razor; he can convince people, especially girls, that he is sincere when he is really lying to them; and he acts as though he likes people even though he is only in love with himself. Holden should therefore despise Stradlater, but instead he lends him his new hounds-tooth jacket and writes an English Composition essay for him. But Holden later gets in a fight with Stradlater because he worries that Stradlater might have seduced Jane Gallagher who is an old friend of Holden's. Holden is concerned, because most of the other boys at Pencey only claim to have had sexual intercourse; but from talking to a couple of girls, Holden knows that Stradlater really did have sex with some of his dates. Thus when Holden says that he hates Stradlater's guts, this may be in part because he envies him.
Yet another pair of minor characters that shed light on Holden's personality are Jane Gallagher and Sally Hayes. The characterization of the two tells us much about Holden's attitude toward the opposite sex. Holden met Jane Gallagher in the summer of 1948 when her family and Holden's were neighbors at a summer resort in Maine. All summer, Holden and Jane played tennis and golf together, and in the evenings they went to the movies or played checkers. Holden's mother didn't think Jane was pretty, and Holden admits that she is "muckle-mouthed," by which he means she distorts her mouth a lot when she talks. But she has a terrific figure and above all a terrific personality. The two things that impress Holden most about Jane are that she always reads good books and that she never uses her kings when playing checkers but always keeps them in the back row because she likes the way the stacked-up pieces look when they are all lined up. Holden and Jane went around holding hands all the time, but they never actually necked. The two times they got close to getting physical were when Jane was crying and Holden kissed her tears away and when Jane suddenly put her hand on Holden's neck while they were watching a movie. Holden thinks that this is a typical thing for adult women to do to their children or their husbands, but if a young girl does it, it is unbearably pretty. In short, Jane Gallagher brings out a deep fondness in Holden, similar to what he feels for his dead brother Allie and for his little sister Phoebe.
We wonder therefore what Holden sees in his girlfriend Sally Hayes who is in many ways the opposite of Jane. For one thing, Sally is extremely good-looking and is very concerned about everybody's appearance. For instance, she tells Holden to grow out his crew cut because crew cuts are getting to be corny. Also, on their date, she wants to go skating at Radio City because she can rent one of those tiny skating skirts that look very good on her. Holden therefore calls Sally "the queen of the phonies" (116). However, when he meets her at the Biltmore hotel for their Sunday date, Holden is overwhelmed by how gorgeous she looks. He even says that as soon as he saw her, he felt he wanted to marry her. But in retrospect, he admits that this was a crazy idea because he didn't even like her very much. Aside from her phoniness, another one of the reasons Holden doesn't like Sally much is that she has a loud, embarrassing voice. But then Holden adds that Sally can get away with that kind of voice because she is so good-looking. Even though Holden finds Sally irritating, he starts necking with her as soon as they get in the back of a taxicab. Holden even tells Sally that he loves her, but then he explains to us that he was lying when he said that but that he meant it at the time. The reason Holden briefly feels he loves Sally is, of course, that she is willing to play kissing and groping games with him.
Holden can no longer overlook the differences in his and Sally's personalities when he finds out that she is actually looking forward to becoming an adult and living the kind of conformist upper-middle-class life that Holden rebels against. This is why he finally tells her that she gives him "a royal pain in the ass" and why he lets her go home by herself. He says that he should not have done that but that he was totally fed up with Sally. Without being aware of it, Holden here affirms a mature preference for substance over appearance, for the terrific personality of Jane Gallagher over the terrific looks of Sally Hayes.
The most important minor character in the novel is Holden's ten-year-old sister Phoebe. She is so important because she brings out a belated sense of responsibility in Holden and makes him end his rebellion. Holden mentions Phoebe early on in the novel and says about her that she is extremely smart and pretty. She is "roller-skate-skinny" and has red hair similar to that of Holden's dead brother Allie. She gets straight A's in school, and she likes to write novels that she never finishes about a girl detective named Hazle Weatherfield. Holden considers Phoebe one of the very few people who really understand him. Phoebe's only fault, so Holden says, is that she is sometimes a bit too affectionate.
When we finally see Phoebe for the first time, we find that she is unusually perceptive and mature for a ten-year-old. Because Holden is home early for Christmas vacation and sneaks into the apartment, Phoebe figures out at once that Holden must have flunked out of yet another private school. When Holden tells her that he plans to hitchhike out West to work on a ranch in Colorado, Phoebe doesn't approve but gives him her Christmas money for travel expenses. Moreover, she also senses that Holden feels very depressed and lonesome. She therefore leaves school, packs her suitcase, and insists on coming along with Holden. Although Holden is moved by Phoebe's unconditional love, he won't allow her to run away with him. At this point Holden exhibits a sense of responsibility that we have not seen in him before. He accepts that he is his sister's keeper and that he must make sure Phoebe goes back to school. He therefore gives up his plan to run away and promises to go home and face his parents.
*
The way Holden Caulfield talks reveals just as much about the contradictions in his character as what he does. The silliness of Holden's speech mannerisms contrasts with his astute insights and his strongly held values. Taken out of context, almost any long quotation of what Holden is saying must seem insipid. For instance, Holden keeps attaching meaningless phrases such as "and all," "or something," and "or anything" to the end of many statements, as in "it's a pretty good book and all," "we could get married or something," and "there was no sun out or anything."
Moreover, like many adolescents who want to seem tough by sneering at the world, Holden attaches emphatic negative adjectives to nouns, adjectives such as "lousy," "goddam," "stupid," "crazy," "crumby," "corny," or "phony." For instance, on the first page of the novel, Holden says that he won't talk about his "lousy childhood" because he doesn't want to tell us his "whole goddam autobiography." And a few pages later, he talks about the "crazy cannon" on top of a "stupid hill" at Pencey Preparatory School.
Another speech mannerism is Holden's habit of attaching the adjective "old" to the names of people. This makes sense when he speaks of "old Spencer," his history teacher who is close to retirement. It does not make sense when he speaks of "old Phoebe," his ten-year-old sister. However the adjective "old" is not a term of endearment, as in Jay Gatsby's beloved phrase "old sport." Holden applies the adjective equally to people he likes and people he hates. For instance he talks about "old Maurice," the pimp who beats him up, and about "old Sally" who gives him "a royal pain in the ass."
And finally, Holden keeps repeating two statements that he is very fond of. One of them is "if you want to know the truth" and the other one is that something or someone "really kills me."
Since the style of The Catcher in the Rye is so distinctive, it begs to be parodied. And indeed, one of the reviews of the novel was written as a parody of its style. Here is part of the opening paragraph:

This girl Helga, she kills me. She reads just about everything I bring into the house, and a lot of crumby stuff besides. She's crazy about kids. I mean stories about kids. But Hel, she says there's hardly a writer alive can write about children. ... It depresses her. That's another thing. She can sniff out a corny guy or a phony book as quick as a dog smells a rat. This phoniness, it gives old Hel a pain if you want to know the truth. That's why she came hollering to me one day, her hair falling over her face and all, and said I had to read some damn story in The New Yorker. Who's the author? I said. Salinger, she told me. J. D. Salinger. Who's he? I asked.
(Stern 2)

Settings and Symbols

The time and locations of the settings in The Catcher in the Rye can be established from information that Holden mentions in passing. The narrative begins on Saturday afternoon, the 17th of December 1949 at the Pencey Preparatory School for Boys in Pennsylvania, and it ends on Monday morning, the 19th of December, in New York City. Even though it is winter, there are almost as many scenes that take place outdoors as indoors. Most of the outdoor scenes occur in New York, and the most memorable one is the scene of Holden watching Phoebe ride the carrousel in Central Park in the pouring rain.
Like Salinger's earlier fiction, The Catcher in the Rye provides only sketchy, impressionistic descriptions of its physical settings. A typical example is the description of the home of Mr. Spencer, Holden's history teacher at Pencey Prep. After Holden rings the bell and Mrs. Spencer opens the door, Holden says: "They didn't have a maid or anything, and they always opened the door themselves. They didn't have too much dough" (5). And all that Holden mentions about the inside of the Spencers' house is that Mr. Spencer, who had the grippe, was sitting in a big leather chair, wrapped in a blanket, and that "there were pills and medicine all over the place, and everything smelled like Vicks Nose Drops" (7). As this example shows, the social milieu seems to be more important in the settings of The Catcher in the Rye than the physical details.
What almost all the indoor settings--except for the Spencers' home--have in common is that the social environment is upper middle class. First of all, Holden says about the social milieu of Pencey Prep that quite a few of his fellow students come from very wealthy families. When he goes home to talk to his sister Phoebe, we find that his parents' apartment house is located in one of the most expensive areas of Manhattan, on 71st Street just off Fifth Avenue, and that the family has a live-in maid. Later, Holden visits his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini, and says that he lived in a "very swanky apartment" and that his wife "was lousy with dough." The only indoor settings in New York that are not upper middle class are the hotel where Holden meets the young prostitute Sunny and the restaurant where he meets the two nuns.
There are three settings in the novel that are important because they cannot be associated with social class and because they have symbolic significance. One of these settings is the room with the dioramas in the Museum of Natural History. That room is symbolic because Holden's fondness for it reveals his desire to have things always stay the same. Another of these symbolic settings is Phoebe's elementary school, the same school where Holden went when he was younger. That school also symbolizes the kind of stability that Holden likes, and he is very much upset when that stability is threatened by obscene graffiti.
A third symbolic setting is an imaginary one. It is the cabin by a brook to which Holden wants to escape with Sally Hayes. Later in the novel, we get another version of that cabin to which he wants to escape by himself.
*
The Catcher in the Rye develops its meaning chiefly through its major symbols and through the change in the connotation of the central metaphor of the catcher in the rye. Like the symbolic settings in the novel, most of the symbolic objects contribute to the characterization of Holden Caulfield. Six major symbols in the novel are the ducks in Central Park, Holden's red hunting cap, the glass cases in the Museum of Natural History, the cabin by the woods to which Holden wants to escape, the obscene graffiti, and the carrousel in Central Park. An analysis of these symbols clarifies the inner change that Holden experiences.
Before discussing the novel's symbols, it is necessary to analyze the novel's central metaphor, Holden wanting to be the catcher in the rye. Holden comes up with the idea when his little sister Phoebe tells him that he doesn't like anything or anybody and that he doesn't even know what he would like to be when he grows up. Holden replies that he does know what he wants to be when he grows up. He says when he heard the song, "If a body catch a body coming through the rye," he decided that that's what he wants to be, the catcher in the rye. Phoebe corrects him and says that the line goes, "If a body meet a body coming through the rye," and that it is not from a song but from a poem by Robert Burns. This information doesn't make a difference to Holden, and he explains that he keeps picturing thousands of little children playing in an enormous field of rye which has a steep cliff at one end, and there are no adults around except for him. He says that if the little kids are running and not looking where they are going, "I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff" (173). That's all he wants to do all day; that's the only thing he would really like to be, the catcher in the rye.
The way Holden explains why he wants to be the catcher in the rye shows the kindness and unselfishness of his character. However, the surreal nature of the metaphor also reveals Holden's unwillingness to face the real life choices he needs to make now that he is approaching adulthood. By the end of the novel, Holden realizes that children won't grow up if there's always someone there to protect them from all potential harm. He therefore gives up his dream of being the catcher in the rye and is ready to make a realistic choice of what he wants to do with his life.
As far as the symbols in the novel go, the most obvious one is Holden's hat. Holden describes it as a red hunting hat with a very long visor. When Holden's dorm neighbor Ackley tells him that where he comes from, people wear that kind of hat to shoot deer in, Holden replies that his is not a deer shooting hat but a people shooting hat.
Holden's hat is a complex symbol because it suggests several interpretations of its meaning. For one thing, it can be seen as a badge of Holden's deliberate non-conformity. He bought it because it clashes with the rest of his getup, his sports coat and tie. Also, he likes to draw attention to the incongruous hat by wearing it with the visor turned backward. By turning the visor backward Holden suggests that his values are the reverse of what everybody else's are. It is also the way that baseball catchers wear their caps. Therefore Holden's turning the visor of the hat to the back can be seen as foreshadowing his desire to be the catcher in the rye. And finally, because Holden calls it a people shooting hat, it symbolizes his dislike of most of the people around him. This dislike is very obvious to those who know Holden well. For instance, both his sister Phoebe and his favorite teacher Antolini tell him that he hates more people than he likes.
Near the end of the novel the hat disappears temporarily because Holden gives it to Phoebe. It is significant that Holden does not have the hat when his inner change occurs, when he decides not to run away. The hat reappears on Holden's head--this time with the visor facing front--in the carrousel scene where it gives Holden protection while he is sitting on a park bench in the pouring rain.
Symbols that illustrate a more positive aspect of Holden's character than the hunting hat are the ducks in Central Park. Holden thinks of them for the first time while his history teacher is talking to him. He says he was not paying attention to Mr. Spencer because he suddenly started to wonder where the Central Park ducks go when the lagoon freezes over. Holden mentions the ducks in Central Park several more times and even asks two New York cab drivers if they know what happens to the ducks when the lagoon freezes. Holden's obsession with the ducks has been interpreted in a number of different ways. It has been suggested that the ducks represent Holden who also feels he has no place to go and is being "frozen out." Another view is that the mystery of the disappearance of the ducks can be likened to the mystery of people's disappearance into death. Still another interpretation of the meaning of the ducks picks up on Holden's idea that maybe some park employee came with a truck and took them to a zoo for the winter. Thus, when Holden wonders about the fate of the ducks, he is really wondering if there is some benevolent authority, some God, that takes care of humans just as the zoo employee takes care of the ducks. But the most common sense interpretation is simply that Holden's concern for the well-being of the ducks illustrates an important character trait, his compassion for all living things.
Another important symbol in The Catcher in the Rye is the glass cases in the Museum of Natural History. These dioramas display life-size figures of Indians weaving blankets and Eskimos catching fish. They are what Holden likes best in the museum because even if he went there a thousand times, the Eskimo would still be catching the same two fish and the Indian squaw would still be weaving the same blanket. They would not be different even though he, Holden, would have changed. Holden concludes that certain things should always stay the same: "You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone" (122). Here we realize that Holden is troubled by change in general. He knows that he himself can't help changing as he grows up, but he wants the things he likes to be exempt from change. But eventually, at the end of the novel, during the carrousel scene, he overcomes this desire for immutability
A symbol that illustrates a more adult side of Holden's character than the glass cases with the Indians and Eskimos is the cabin in or on the edge of the woods. At a first glance, this symbol seems to represent only his wish to escape from the world of the phonies and from the kind of upper-middle-class future his parents have mapped out for him. But a close analysis shows that there is more to the symbol than that.
The cabin appears in two versions. Holden comes up with the idea of escaping to a cabin in the woods for the first time when he tries to get Sally Hayes to run away with him to Massachusetts or Vermont. He tells her that they will stay in a cabin camp until their money runs out. Then he will get a job somewhere, and they will live by a brook, and eventually they might get married. At this point, Holden's escape plan is still very sketchy. Later, he comes up with a more elaborate plan which includes the second version of the cabin. This time he plans to hitchhike to somewhere way out West where it is very pretty and sunny and where nobody knows him. He will get a job at a filling station, and he will pretend to be a deaf-mute. That way, he won't have to have "any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody" (198). If someone wants to talk to him, the person has to write him a note on a piece of paper. With the money he earns at the gas station Holden plans to build himself a little cabin on the edge of the woods but not right in the woods because he wants the cabin to be in a place that is sunny all the time. He will do all his own cooking, and later on, he will meet a beautiful girl who is also a deaf-mute, and they will get married. If they have any children, they will hide them and home-school them. Holden imagines that he will not want to come home to New York until he is about thirty-five or until someone in the family gets very sick and wants to see him before the person dies. That will be the only reason for him to leave his cabin. He plans to invite his family to come and visit him in his cabin, but if any of them do anything phony, he won't let them stay.
In retrospect, Holden realizes that the part of his plan about pretending to be a deaf-mute was crazy, but he stresses that he really did decide to go out West. We therefore need to take his plan seriously. When we do, we realize that both versions of his dream of living in a cabin away from society involve his plan to eventually get married. In other words, Holden is realistic enough to know that once he is an adult, he will not want to live alone. This aspect of the cabin symbolism reveals that despite his dream of escape, Holden is on the verge of accepting adulthood.
When Holden crosses the threshold between adolescence and adulthood, two symbols help us understand his inner change. Both symbols show up near the end of the novel. One is the obscene graffiti and the other is the carrousel in Central Park. In both cases, we see a change in Holden's attitude toward those symbols.
Holden's initial response to the obscene graffiti is to erase them, to pretend that they were never there. The first "Fuck you" that Holden sees on a wall in Phoebe's school is written in crayon, and so he has no trouble rubbing it out. But the second "Fuck you" is scratched into a wall with a knife, and Holden can't erase it. At this point Holden comes to the realization that even if he had a million years, he could not erase half the "Fuck you" signs in the world. And then he sees another "Fuck you" in one of his favorite places of refuge in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is very depressing to him, and he realizes that he will never find "a place that's nice and peaceful" because there aren't any such places. He says that even if you think you have found such a place, "somebody'll sneak up and write 'Fuck you' right under your nose" (204).
The graffiti can be seen as symbols of all the negative things that Holden wants children to be protected from. But he comes to realize that they cannot be protected from all of them. When Holden still thought he wanted to be the catcher in the rye, he believed he could rub out all the "Fuck you" signs in the world. By the end of the novel he knows he can't. Moreover, he also knows that he cannot escape to a place that is free from "Fuck you" signs. In short, the ubiquitousness of the "Fuck you" signs is one of the reasons Holden gives up his dream of escaping to a cabin by the woods.
The carrousel in Central Park is a symbol that also suggests a change in Holden, but it is a more complex symbol than the obscene graffiti. There's an obvious aspect to the meaning of the carrousel, an aspect that Holden seems to be aware of, and a less obvious aspect that he seems unaware of.
The less obvious aspect of the carrousel's meaning has to do with Holden's telling Phoebe that he changed his mind and that he is not going away anywhere. They are walking out of the zoo at Central Park and toward the carrousel, and it is starting to rain. Holden hears the carrousel music long before the carrousel comes into sight. The song is "Oh, Marie!" which Holden says he heard "about fifty years ago" when he was a little kid (210). This is one thing he likes about carrousels, he says, they keep on playing the same songs. Here Holden is still associating the carrousel with his childish desire to have things always stay the same, like the dioramas in the Museum of Natural History.
But when Holden and Phoebe come to the carrousel, Holden's attitude changes. Phoebe wants the two of them to take a ride together, but Holden tells her that he'll just watch her. Then he buys Phoebe a ticket and sits down on one of the benches surrounding the carrousel where the parents of the other children on the carrousel are sitting. When the rain starts coming down hard, the other adults seek shelter, but Holden continues sitting on his bench. He gets very wet, but he says he didn't bother to get out of the rain because he suddenly felt very happy about watching Phoebe ride the carrousel. He explains: "It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around in her blue coat and all" (213).
The carrousel is therefore a symbol that has more than one level of meaning. Although it awakes childhood memories in Holden, it helps him define himself as being no longer a child. Watching Phoebe ride the carrousel brings Holden a vicarious enjoyment similar to that of the parents of the other children on the carrousel. It seems that he is enjoying his first taste of what it is like to be an adult and that he is enjoying it so much that he doesn't mind getting soaked to the skin in the heavy December rain.
All this is confirmed by what Holden actually realizes about the symbolism of the carrousel. On this particular carrousel the children are supposed to lunge upward and try to pull down a golden ring. Holden says that he is afraid Phoebe might fall off the carrousel horse, but he stops himself from doing or saying anything. He has come to understand that when children want to go for the golden ring, we should not stop them. He says: "if they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them" (211). Holden here realizes that the carrousel represents life and grabbing for the gold ring represents the chances that children must take in order to grow up. When we see Holden allow Phoebe take her chances, we realize that he no longer wants to be the catcher in the rye and that he has come to accept adulthood.

Themes and Interpretations

There aren't many twentieth-century novels that have been more frequently analyzed in print than The Catcher in the Rye. Among the hundreds of interpretations, four trends stand out. One is an historical approach which relates The Catcher in the Rye to Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Another is a sociological approach which treats the novel as social criticism. A third approach is psychological and focuses on Holden's transition from adolescence to adulthood. And a fourth approach examines the moral and religious implications of the novel.
The first systematic comparison of The Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Edgar Branch's essay "Mark Twain and J. D. Salinger: A Study in Literary Continuity." Branch says that "the two novels are clearly related in narrative pattern and style, characterization of the hero and critical import" (217). Moreover, Branch argues that "Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye share certain ethical and social attitudes. Yet Salinger's critical view assumes a cultural determinism that in Huckleberry Finn, although always present, permits freedom through self-guidance" (216). Like many early critics, Branch sees the ending of The Catcher in the Rye as pessimistic and that of Huckleberry Finn as optimistic. He writes: "Huckleberry Finn, in short, recognizes both necessity and freedom, the restrictions limiting moral accomplishment and its possibility. The Catcher in the Rye leaves us doubtful that the individual, even assisted by the analyst's best efforts, can ever truly escape the double trap of society and self" (214-215). What further contributes to the "underlying despair of Salinger's book," so Branch says, is that Holden has not matured or learned anything by the end of the novel and that "Holden wants to remain forever the catcher in the rye" (215).
Unlike Edgar Branch and most early critics, Carl F. Strauch sees the ending of The Catcher in the Rye as optimistic. In his essay, "Kings in the Back Row: Meaning Through Structure--A Reading of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye," Strauch says that "the conclusion is neither pessimistic nor, for that matter, ironical in any sense perceived thus far" (47). Strauch argues that by the end of the novel, Holden has "miraculously wrought his own cure" (48) because he has accepted a sense of responsibility. Strauch says: "The conclusion is, therefore, optimistic and affirmative" (48).
As Strauch describes it, the meaning of the novel is both psychological and philosophical because Catcher is a story of an irresponsible young neurotic who dies a figurative death and is reborn as a new, healthy, and responsible individual. The support for this reading of the novel comes from a detailed analysis of what Strauch calls its "interlocking metaphorical structure" (48). This structure consists of four stages in the novel, Holden's "neurotic deterioration," his "symbolical death," his "spiritual awakening," and his "psychological self-cure" (48).
Several later interpretations have analyzed The Catcher in the Rye in more rigid psychoanalytical terms. James Bryan's essay, "The Psychological Structure of The Catcher in the Rye" is a Freudian analysis which defines Holden's neurosis as "a frantic need to save his sister from himself" (107). Bryan bases this notion on the psychoanalytical axiom that "a sister is often the first replacement for the mother as love object, and that normal maturation guides the boy from the sister to other women." However Holden has a serious problem because "Holden's sexuality is swaying precariously between reversion and maturation" (107). Fortunately, so Bryan contends, "Phoebe's responses to Holden's secret needs become the catalyst for both his breakdown and his recovery" (111).
More recently there have been Adlerian and Lacanian readings of The Catcher in the Rye. In the essay, "Adlerian Theory and Its Application to The Catcher in the Rye--Holden Caulfield," R. J. Huber explains that Adlerian psychoanalysts are always interested in knowing whether an individual "feels competent or inferior, and whether [s/he] strives with or without social interest in mind" (47). Huber's conclusion is that Holden "reveals deep-seated inferiority feelings and a compensatory striving for grandiosity" (48).
The most fashionable psychological study of the novel is James Mellard's essay "The Disappearing Subject: A Lacanian Reading of The Catcher in the Rye." Mellard shares Carl Strauch's view that Holden eventually cures himself. According to Mellard, Holden passes through the Lacanian stages of "alienation" and "separation" from the "Other" but eventually achieves symbolic wholeness with that "Other" (203-204). Here is how Mellard describes the moment when Holden becomes whole again: "Restored to the only sort of fullness that shall ever be available to one who has acceded to the Symbolic, Holden is gripped by joy at this moment. Sitting on a bench in the sudden rain, watching Phoebe go around on the carrousel, at this final moment of the main narrative, Holden feels unbounded pleasure, perhaps a Lacanian jouissance" (211). Reacting to the argument of earlier critics that when Holden tells his story, he is a patient in a mental institution, Mellard says that "on the evidence of the story he tells, he no longer has any real need for therapy. He would appear to be as healthy, as 'whole,' as sane as anyone ever might be" (211).
Many critics have assumed that when Holden tells his story, he is a patient in a mental institution. But as early as 1963, Warren French pointed out that there's no textual proof for that assumption. In his book J. D. Salinger, French says: "Even though Holden acknowledges being attended by a psychoanalyst at the end of the book, his breakdown is clearly not just--or even principally--mental" (108). French points out that Holden is physically ill and that "his run-down physical condition magnifies the pain" of his "emotional and intellectual problems" (109). French describes the plot as being partially Holden's quest for sympathy for his physical condition and for a place of peaceful refuge. Being denied this sympathy and refuge, Holden physically collapses. But as French notes, there is another story intertwined with that of Holden's physical breakdown and that is "the story of the breaking down of Holden's self-centeredness and his gradual acceptance of the world that has rejected him" (115). What Holden learns from his experiences is "the injunction that we must all love each other" (116). But French does not believe that Salinger develops "the idea of universal compassion" convincingly in the novel: "The trouble with compassion is that, although without it one cannot be a decent human being, it cannot by itself provide a person with the means of making himself useful. ... Being simply a saint requires no education" (118).
The notion that Holden is some kind of a saint or even a Christ figure is advanced in several interpretations of The Catcher in the Rye. For instance, in his essay "The Saint as a Young Man: A Reappraisal of The Catcher in the Rye," Jonathan Baumbach argues that what Holden wants is "to be a saint--the protector and savior of innocence. But what he also wants ... is that someone prevent his fall" (56). For this reason, so Baumbach says, "Holden's real quest throughout the novel is for a spiritual father" (56). However, Holden does not find such a spiritual father: "The world, devoid of good fathers (authorities), becomes a soul-destroying chaos in which his survival is possible only through withdrawal into childhood, into fantasy, into psychosis" (57). Holden's savior turns out not to be a father figure but his ten-year-old sister Phoebe. Baumbach concludes: "The last scene, in which Holden, suffused with happiness, sits in the rain and watches Phoebe ride on the merry-go-round, is indicative not of his crack-up, as has been assumed, but of his redemption" (471).
Although some critics have noted that Holden is not an average adolescent because he comes from a very wealthy family, it wasn't until the mid-seventies that we got a socio-economic interpretation of The Catcher in the Rye. In the essay "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye," Carol and Richard Ohmann offer a Marxist interpretation of the novel. They call The Catcher in the Rye "a case study in capitalist criticism" (119) and note that "Salinger wrote about power and wealth and reviewers and critics about good and evil and the problems of growing up" (122). The Ohmanns agree with previous critics that "Holden's sensitivity is the heart of the book," but they disagree with everyone else when it come to the question "What does he reject?" (129) Yes, it is phoniness that Holden rejects, but the Ohmanns contend that "this phoniness is rooted in the economic and social arrangements of capitalism, and in their concealment" (130). The two critics cite a number of passages to prove that "the novel's critique of class distinction may be found, not just between the lines of Holden's account, but in some of his most explicit comments on what's awry in his world" (131).
The Ohmanns conclude with a speculation as to what response Salinger expected from his readers: "Given Salinger's perception of what's wrong, there are three possible responses: do the best you can with this society; work for a better one; flee society altogether" (134). The Ohmanns fault Salinger for Holden's response to this choice: "When Holden imagines an adult self he can think only of the Madison Avenue executive or the deaf-mute, this society or no society" (134). And yet, the two critics give Salinger credit for creating an accurate picture of social reality in mid-century America: "The Catcher in the Rye is among other things a serious critical mimesis of bourgeois life in the Eastern United States, ca. 1950--of snobbery, privilege, class injury, culture as a badge of superiority, sexual exploitation, education subordinated to status, warped social feeling, competitiveness, stunted human possibility, the list could go on" (135).
The Ohmanns here map out a list of socio-economic themes that could be profitably pursued in further interpretations of The Catcher in the Rye, but very little such criticism has been published in the meantime. In fact, since the mid-seventies, very little has been written about the novel that has not been said before. In addition to the Lacanian interpretation of James Mellard that I mentioned before, the only notable studies have been essays on the reception of The Catcher in the Rye by readers in foreign countries and by female readers in the United States.
A little known fact in Salinger lore is that The Catcher in the Rye--in the translation of Nobel Laureate Heinrich Böll (Der Fänger im Roggen)--was required reading in the West German secondary schools for over 20 years. In an article entitled "Jerome D. Salinger's Novel The Catcher in the Rye as Required Reading in Upper Level German Classes" (1968), Fritz Kraul defends that choice. Kraul notes that "Salinger's novel continues a narrative tradition which was based on novels of social criticism by writers such as Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis." As Kraul describes it, The Catcher in the Rye "depicts the conflict between the individual and society, and in particular the difficulties which face today's American adolescents" (79). The novel is valuable because "it affords a picture of contemporary American society" and because Holden Caulfield's story is that of a "protest against society" (81). The chief targets of the protest are society's "conformity and the pressure to succeed" (83). As positive values the novel holds up "the selflessness of the two nuns, the courage of James Castle, and the patience of Holden's late brother Allie" (86).
More recently, The Catcher in the Rye has become the subject of gender criticism. In her essay, "Holden Caulfield: C'est Moi," Mary Suzanne Schriber points out that almost all previous criticism on The Catcher in the Rye was written by males. She cites a number of critics who admit that they identify with Holden and therefore assume that Holden's experiences and view of life are universal. Therefore, "the popularity and the ascription of broad significance and exceptional literary importance to The Catcher in the Rye can be traced to ... assumptions that the male is the normative" (235). These assumptions, so Schriber argues, have led male critics to accord The Catcher in the Rye the status of a classic of American literature. Schriber disagrees because she claims that female readers do not identify with Holden the way male readers do because "an adolescent male WASP is not automatically nature's designated spokesperson for us all" (236). In short, Schriber argues that once the responses of female readers are considered, The Catcher in the Rye will no longer be rated as highly as it has been in the past.

Conclusion

Despite some feminist protests, there is almost universal agreement that The Catcher in the Rye is a classic of twentieth-century American literature. The novel deserves that distinction because it is an extremely well constructed piece of verbal art. But like all human creations, it is by no means perfect. What grates on some readers is that in two separate scenes taking place the same evening Holden's roommate Stradlater and his dorm neighbor Ackley both happen to trim their finger and toe nails in Holden's presence, that Holden pointlessly summarizes a "putrid" movie he has seen, that Mr. Antolini pontificates too much and says too little, and, above all, that Holden incessantly repeats phrases such as "it really kills me" and "if you want to know the truth." But these are quibbles over what not everyone thinks of as weaknesses. What makes up for these weaknesses (if they are such) are the novel's strengths in narrative structure, characterization, and symbolism.
While early critics of the novel stressed the episodic nature of the plot and were unable to see any development in Holden's character, it has by now been firmly established that the episodes of the plot are held together by several strands of narrative development and that one of them is a pattern of character change. In short, Holden is not a static character but experiences an inner change, and this change is a movement from adolescence to adulthood, from his immature desire to be the catcher in the rye to his mature understanding that if children want to grab for the gold ring, we should not stop them but let them take the risk of falling.
Another strength of the novel is the characterization of Holden as a very complex human being who is at once generous and materialistic, illiterate and well-read, an atheist and a fan of Jesus. Despite these contradictions, one thing stands out about him and that is his unusual kindness. This kindness extends to pimply fellow students, to ugly girls, to underage prostitutes, to nuns who will never eat at swanky restaurants, and to the freezing ducks in Central Park. And even though the minor characters are designed chiefly to bring out specific personality traits in Holden, most of them assume a life of their own in the reader's imagination, from the "muckle-mouthed" Jane Gallagher who keeps her kings in the back row during checkers to the hairy-bellied pimp Maurice who snaps his fingers very hard at the crotch of Holden's pajamas before beating him up.
Perhaps the most important and the most impressive aspect of the novel is its symbolism. None of the symbols are artificial, all of them occur naturally in the scenes in which they appear, and most of them allow several different interpretations. The most notable examples are Holden's hunting hat and the ducks in Central Park. Moreover, some of the symbols are constructed in such a way that the change in their meaning parallels the change in Holden's outlook. This is the case with the obscene graffiti in Phoebe's school and with the carrousel in Central Park. Parallel to the change in the meaning of those symbols, the central metaphor of the catcher in the rye also changes its connotation from positive to negative.
Because of the multi-layered narrative structure, the complex characterization of Holden Caulfield, the many memorable minor characters, and the rich symbolism, The Catcher in the Rye allows more interpretations than the average novel. This thematic richness is the ultimate proof that this novel is a work of art of the first rank.
Twenty-five years after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, a critic noted that so much criticism had been written about it that it was hard to imagine that anyone could say anything new. And yet that same year, in 1976, Carol and Richard Ohmann published a Marxist analysis and pointed out a number of socio-economic themes that had not yet been pursued.
At this writing--51 years after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye--some of the themes pointed out by the Ohmanns still have not been explored, for instance the theme of social class and privilege and the theme of education subordinated to status. Also, we do not yet have any good psychological analyses of the novel. What we have so far are efforts to use the novel to illustrate psychological concepts rather than efforts to use psychological concepts to interpret the novel. Another approach to The Catcher in the Rye that has been neglected so far is the reader response approach. This is an approach that the novel definitely calls for because Holden Caulfield not only addresses a specific kind of reader, but his narrative is full of gaps for the reader to fill.

Works Cited

Baumbach, Jonathan. "The Saint as a Young Man: A Reappraisal of The Catcher in the Rye." Modern Language Quarterly 25 (December 1964): 461-472. Rpt. in Salzberg 55-64.
Behrman, N. S. "The Vision of the Innocent" [Review]. New Yorker (11 August 1951): 64-68.
Branch, Edgar. "Mark Twain and J. D. Salinger: A Study in Literary Continuity." American Quarterly 9 (Summer 1957): 144-58. Rpt. in Grunwald 205-217.
Breit, Harvey. "Reader's Choice" [Review]. Atlantic Monthly 188 (August 1951): 82. Rpt. in Marsden 6-7.
Bryan, James. "The Psychological Structure of The Catcher in the Rye." Publications of the Modern Language Association 89 (1974): 1065-1074. Rpt. in Salzberg 101-117.
Burger, Nash K. "The Catcher in the Rye" [Review]. New York Times (16 July 1951): 19.
French, Warren. "The Artist as a Very Nervous Young Man." In J. D. Salinger. New York: Twayne, 1963, 102-129.
Goodman, Anne. "Mad About Children" [Review]. New Republic 125 (16 July 1951): 20-21. Rpt. in Salzberg 23-24.
Grunwald, Henry A., ed. Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait. New York: Harper, 1962.
Hassan, Ihab. "Rare Quixotic Gesture: The Fiction of J. D. Salinger." Western Review 21 (Summer 1957): 261-280. Rpt. in Grunwald 138-163.
Heiserman, Arthur, and James E. Miller. "J. D. Salinger: Some Crazy Cliff." Western Humanities Review 10 (Spring 1956): 129-137. Rpt. in Grunwald 196-205.
Huber, R. J. "Adlerian Theory and Its Application to The Catcher in the Rye--Holden Caulfield." In Psychological Perspectives on Literature: Freudian Dissidents and Non-Freudians. Ed. Joseph Natoli. New York: Archon, 1984, 43-52.
Hughes, Riley. "The Catcher in the Rye" [Review]. Catholic World 174 (November 1951): 154. Rpt. in Salzberg 31.
Jones, Ernest. "Case History of All of Us" [Review]. Nation 173 (1 September 1951): 176. Rpt. in Salzberg 24-25.
Kraul, Fritz. "Jerome D. Salingers Roman 'Der Fänger im Roggen' als Pflichtlektüre im Deutschunterricht der Oberstufe." Der Roman im Unterricht 20 (1968): 79-86.
Longstreth, Morris. "Review of The Catcher in the Rye." Christian Science Monitor (19 July 1951): 7. Rpt. in Salzberg 30-31.
Marsden, Malcolm, ed. If You Really Want To Know: A Catcher Casebook. Chicago: Scott Foresman, 1963.
Maxwell, William. "J. D. Salinger." Book of the Month Club News (July 1951): 5-6.
Mellard, James. "The Disappearing Subject: A Lacanian Reading of The Catcher in the Rye." Rpt. in Salzberg 197-214.
Ohmann, Carol, and Richard Ohmann. "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye." Critical Inquiry 3 (Autumn 1976): 15-37. Rpt. in Salzberg 119-140.
Peterson, Virgilia. "Three Days in the Bewildering World of an Adolescent" [Review]. New York Herald Tribune Book Review (15 July 1951): 3. Rpt. in Marsden 3-4.
Salzberg, Joel, ed. Critical Essays on Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.
Schriber, Mary Suzanne. "Holden Caulfield: C'est Moi." In Critical Essays on Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Ed. Joel Salzberg. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990, 226-238.
Smith, Harrison. "Manhattan Ulysses, Junior" [Review]. Saturday Review of Literature 34 (14 July 1951): 12-13. Rpt. in Salzberg 28-30.
Steiner, George. "The Salinger Industry." Nation 189 (14 November 1959): 360-363. Rpt. in Grunwald 82-85.
Stern, James. "Aw, the World's a Crummy Place" [Parody/Review]. New York Times Book Review (15 July 1951): 5. Rpt. in Marsden 2-3.
Strauch, Carl F. "Kings in the Back Row: Meaning Through Structure--A Reading of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 2 (Winter 1961): 5-30. Rpt. in Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye": Clamor vs. Criticism. Ed Harold P. Simonson and Philip E. Hager. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1963, 46-62.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Costello, Donald P. "The Language of The Catcher in the Rye." American Speech 34 (October 1959): 172-181. Rpt. in Salzberg 44-53.
Lundquist, James. "Against Obscenity: The Catcher in the Rye." In J. D. Salinger. New York: Ungar, 1979, 37-68.
Oldsey, Bernard. "The Movies in the Rye." College English 23 (December 1961): 209-215. Rpt. in Salzberg 92-99.
Seng, Peter J. "The Fallen Idol: The Immature World of Holden Caulfield." College English 32 (December 1962): 203-209. Rpt. in Marsden 73-81.
Shulevitz, Judith. "Holden Reconsidered and All." New York Times Book Review (29 July 2001): 23.
Vanderbilt, Kermit. "Symbolic Resolution in The Catcher in the Rye: The Cap, the Carrousel, and the American West." Western Humanities Review 17 (Summer 1963): 271-277.
Weinberg, Helen. "J. D. Salinger's Holden and Seymour and the Spiritual Activist Hero." In The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1970, 141-164.
Source: Eberhard Alsen, "The Catcher in the Rye." In A Reader's Guide to J. D. Salinger, pp. 53-77. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Source Database:** Contemporary Literary Criticism